Welcome

Author, artist, designer and neo-Renaissance Hermeticist. I like to consider that creative activity should aspire to the condition of talismanic magic. Other methods are possibly equally as effective, although perhaps not as cool.

Chasing The Raptor

Fate, Existentialism and Killer Dinosaurs

It has been said that life offers many choices, but really it offers only two: either to chase the raptor, or to be chased by it. Both courses of action are equally dangerous, and the raptor always catches us in the end. But only by choosing the first option do we avoid the role of victim. - Hawkwood -

Eoraptor

Living not long after the beginning of the Triassic, this small carnivore was one of the first dinosaurs.

Shadows in Eden

There's lost lands, heresies, Noah's Ark, heroes of ancient Sparta and a variety of Eves on my other weblog. Clicking on the image will take you there (right click opens a new tab).

On Being the Opposite of a Moth

There's a dark knight, swooning heroines, and sea monsters aplenty on my other weblog. Clicking on the image will take you there (right click opens a new tab).

Coelophysis

Some Useful Terms

Fate: 1. Power predetermining events unalterable from eternity. 2. That which is destined to happen.

Existential: Of or relating to existence.

Existentialism: Philosophical theory emphasising existence of the individual person as free and responsible agent determining his or her own development.

Non sequitur: a conclusion doomed to be false because the starting point is itself a false or erroneous assumption.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose profound insights into the human condition paved the way to the existentialist views of the following century, but who nevertheless failed to discover a single dinosaur.

Othniel Charles Marsh

One of the great pioneers of 19th century dinosaur fossil discoveries, Othniel Marsh once coolly rode into the encampment of Crazy Horse to ask permission to search for fossils on Sioux lands, which action, although commendably diplomatic, went unremarked-upon in philosophical circles.

Chasing the Raptor is listed at:

Hawkwood Recommends:

Bones: The Unity of Form and Function, by R. McNeill AlexanderPhotography by Brian Kosoff

About My Featured Book

Bones: The Unity of Form and Function, by R. McNeill AlexanderPhotography by Brian Kosoff

Packed as it is with lavish and detailed photography, this title might easily have become just another nice-to-look-at coffee table book. But the photographs virtually invite a closer scrutiny of this material, and the author's text offers much more than just an appraisal of what the photographs show. Bones as functional engineering structures, bones as moving mechanisms, bones as growing material, and bones as aesthetic objects in their own right, are all covered in the text. We come to understand such factors as the trade-offs between strength and lightness that are made in bone formation, and even the different evolved forms which teeth have undergone to cope with specialized diets.

The book includes both fossil and contemporary material, from the teeth of an Amazon piranha to the huge chambered fossil skull of the hadrosaur Lambeosaurus, and from the delicate fossil skeleton of a pterosaur no larger than a sparrow to the bone-crunching jaws of a spotted hyena.

In a word: irresistible.

Bishop Ussher

Archbishop James Ussher, who in the 17th-century famously calculated the creation of the Earth to have taken place on the evening before 24 October, 4004 BC; a time scale endorsed by today's Young Earth creationists, thus dating the famed Lascaux cave paintings to some twelve millennia before the planet actually existed. Way to go, Bishop.

Some More Useful Terms

(The experience which prompted me to write these has been garnered over the years of my debating these issues with creationists on assorted Internet forums.)

Creationist: Young Earth Creationists believe that everything was created 6,000 years ago (or even as long as *gasp* 10,000 years ago), and that evolutionary theory is a scientific conspiracy. There are some who might consider this world view medieval. Sane people, for instance.

Evidence: To a creationist, this means anything that the Bible says. To anyone remotely sane, however, evidence means something that can be observed by repeatable experiment, is subject to rigorous peer review, and often has a material reality.

God: A supreme being who gets regularly insulted by creationists who trivialise his grand scheme of creation, which it took him squillions of years to complete, and yet which they insist he threw together in just six extremely busy days, including overtime. If this were true, he would of course have had the unions on his tail.

Satan: The Lord of Darkness himself, who really grooves to what creationists believe because it trivialises God's true achievement (see above).

Kenneth Ham: Founder and director of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky. Is on the record as saying that a T. rex (which, with a staggering *2,900 pounds of force per side of the jaw, had the most powerful bite ever known), ate coconuts and was on board Noah’s Ark (you think I’m making this up? I wish that I was).

Museum: Originally, this was the temple of the Muse in ancient Greece (hence the name). So in an apparent attempt to lend a spurious legitimacy to their own museum, the very Christian creationists unintentionally named their building after a pagan temple. Megafacepalm.

God did it: This is the creationist equivalent of pleading the 5th Amendment. A catch-all response to anything too hard to answer (i.e.: anything put to them in the form of a direct question), such as: ‘why can mitocondrial DNA (inherited through the mother) be traced back to a possible 140,000 years ago?’ Or: ‘why is the human genome 95% identical to the chimpanzee genome?’

God is testing us: This is another useful catch-all response trotted out by creationists when asked such questions as: ‘why are the fossils of marine animals found in the middle of Kansas?’

Wrong: This is a very useful creationist term used to describe virtually anyone or anything other than themselves, such as the sciences, other religious beliefs, you name it. The phrase 'siege mentality' comes to mind.

*See Scientific American, vol. 281, #3

I'm exempting these 'useful terms' from my Creative Commons licence and studio copyright. Feel free to re-post them to the discomfort of creationists. :) A link back to this blog is not required, although always appreciated.

Disclaimer

Ownership of any copyrighted material appearing either as visual, written or audio files on this weblog, remains with the holders of the original copyright, and no further claim to such material by the author of this site is intended, and need not be inferred. It is believed that the limited use of any web resolution images for the purposes of identification and critical commentary qualifies as fair use.

Copyright of any material credited to Hawkwood remains with the author. The registered creative commons license below permits further use and distribution of Hawkwood's work subject to the three conditions: (1) The user attributes the work to 'Hawkwood', (2) The context is non-commercial, (3) The work remains unaltered. A link back to this weblog is appreciated.

Creative Commons License

The First Raptor

The drawing of the claw of Velociraptor featured in my header is from Three new theropoda, Protoceratops zone, Central Mongolia, by Henry Fairfield Osborn. Published by the American Museum of Natural History in American Museum Novitiates, Number 144, November 7, 1924. Osborn's paper contains the first description of this raptor, and names it as Velociraptor mongoliensis (Amer. Mus. type specimen #6515).

It Wouldn't Be Cool

Dinosaurs were warm-blooded, T. rex was a fearsome predator, and birds ARE dinosaurs, because it just wouldn't be cool any other way.

T. Michael Keesey

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

While watching a video of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, with its impressively-detailed animatronic full-scale dinosaur models, I was struck by the thought: how do creationists know what dinosaurs looked like? I mean: there are these moving, snarling model dinosaurs in an institution which has elevated pseudoscience to the dubious level of a theme park attraction, and whose staff (at least, in the various interviews which I have seen them give) appear to have a near-pathological disdain for the scientific method. So how do creationists know what dinosaurs looked like?

Using a line grid to map a fossil site at the Bay of Fundy, Canada

Time on a museum field trip is a precious commodity. It has to be exploited to the maximum, and working hours need to be methodical and calculated. I recall on one field trip getting up at five in the morning, every morning. And weekends simply passed unnoticed. A field trip can by turns be fun, exciting, and tedious – but it is still hard work. How many excursions into the field did it take, over succeeding decades of time, and spanning many, many individual careers, for palaeontologists to reconstruct the dinosaurs’ world? And where did those scientists go to? From the Montana Badlands to arid Outer Mongolia, from Patagonia to Alaska’s North Slope, the destinations of such field trips usually demand lobbying for the necessary funding, and in the cases involving some far-flung destination, as often as not some deft bureaucratic navigation through the acquiring of visas, permits, and other assorted red tape.

Freeing a fossil from its rock matrix

Safely back on base, the conservation work begins: the painstaking release from its matrix, with small hand-held power drill and sable brush, of some fragile fossil, perhaps over a series of weeks or even months, and the publishing of any findings, as well as the report to the board of the museum in question to justify the funds which have been sunk into both the field work and the subsequent in-museum research and restoration time. More often than not, a fossil will not be found in any great degree of articulation: it usually will be both disjointed and incomplete, or even scattered over a wide area. Maybe the skull is missing – or conversely, maybe the skull is the only part found. So what would the missing parts have looked like? And what does the surrounding fossil environment tell us about the fossil itself? Was it buried in a flash flood, or by a collapsed sand dune? Was it a victim of predation, or was it a predator fallen victim to another of its species? What might the fossil bones tell us about that individual dinosaur’s pathologies – its injuries and diseases – which it suffered in life?

Give this grid-defined fossil site map to a creationist, and tell them to restore the dinosaur(s) visible here, using only this map for reference. Click on the image to see the scale of the task!

These are just several of the many questions facing a palaeontologist when confronting a jumbled scattering of disarticulated fossil bones in a field location. And that scattering of bones might be from one individual or from several – and even then they might not be of the same species. Only later will someone like myself be brought in to flesh out the painstakingly restored bones as a life reconstruction, always recognising that there are lines between applied knowledge, reasonable assumption, and artistic licence. Applied knowledge would include such factors as the attachment points of muscles, which usually can be seen on bone as areas of rough pitted striations. Reasonable assumption could be the stance in which the animal is shown, which can be enhanced by the applied knowledge of the way in which the skeleton would have been articulated in life. And artistic licence would typically involve skin colour and patterns, which generally are speculative. But always when creating such a life reconstruction, I am aware of the untold research time of career scientists, both in the field and in the museum, behind what I am doing.

My life reconstruction of the head of a dryosaur: a mix of applied knowledge, reasonable assumption and artistic licence, and drawn with an awareness of the differences between these three factors.

So how do creationists know what dinosaurs looked like? They do not commit their time and *resources to the rigours of museum field work. They do not spend their working lives painstakingly piecing together the herculean puzzles of fossil bones tackled by professional palaeontologists. There is only one answer possible: they have acquired this knowledge by climbing over the backs of the very scientists whom they so openly despise. And the reason why creationists are able to include in their institution those crowd-pulling animatronic dinosaurs is because career scientists of all persuasions, philosophies and beliefs, but all of whom endorse evolutionary theory and geological time, have committed their working lives both to finding and restoring those jumbled scatterings of fossil bones.

Monday, October 29, 2012

I began my previous post by speculating about keeping a pet dinosaur. It was only a short while after I posted it, however, before I realised that I already had done just that! When I lived in Australia I had a pet canary which, in a blaze of originality, I had christened Birdie. Despite his modest size, Birdie was as much of a dinosaur as any other bird alive today, for science now recognises no distinction. In fact, as far as scientific classification goes, there are no birds – just dinosaurs which are classified either as non-avian (all those dinosaurs which we traditionally think of as being just that) and avian (all dinosaurs which we now think of as birds). Or to put it another way: dinosaurs never actually became extinct – they just became birds.

In 1861, just two short years after Charles Darwin shook the prevailing world view with his publication On the Origin of Species, and as if on cue to reinforce all which he claimed, the fossil of a single perfect feather was found in a limestone quarry in Bavaria. The fossil beds were one hundred and fifty million years old, placing the bird within the Late Jurassic. But did the feather really belong to a bird? Nine subsequent finds from the same location (the specimen in the Berlin Museum, above) revealed remarkably preserved fossils of an animal no larger than a raven, which shared the characteristics of both dinosaurs and birds. The feathered wings and tail were clearly visible, but in place of a bird’s beak, this creature had a jawfull of sharp carnivore teeth (the claws and skull of the recently discovered 'Thermopolis' specimen, below).

And not only that: the sternum (breast bone), which in flying birds is massively developed as a distinctive keel shape to anchor the strong pectoral muscles needed for the wing downstroke in flight, was comparatively small and flat. And this animal had a long bony tail, gastralia (belly ribs), and functional grasping claws on its forelimbs – all typical characteristics of raptorial dinosaurs – but not of birds. Science named the animal Archaeopteryx lithographica – Archaeopteryx meaning ‘Ancient Wing’, and lithographica, because the quality limestone quarried at the site was used in the then-prevailing lithographic printing process.

Whether we regard Archaeopteryx as a bird or as a dinosaur has very much to do with our own classifying mindset. In reality, the fluid evolutionary mechanisms of nature do not express themselves in these clear-cut terms. It is both and neither – although for science it is a dinosaur with flight capabilities. But how well could it fly, if at all? The clearly-defined wings of the fossil powerfully suggest the idea, but the skeletal anatomy speaks against it. With a good head wind it might have managed a brief glide, although probably not much more than this. When I made a rough sketch of the overall body shape (above) what became clear was that this animal was a good runner – another trait of its raptorial dinosaur connections. In fact, one fossil of Archaeopteryx which was preserved without feather impressions was for decades thought to be a fossil of the small carnivorous dinosaur Compsognathus, whose habitat Archaeopteryx shared.

Earlier this year, and just over a century and a half after its first discovery, the fossil of that compelling single feather (above, with below it, my drawing of a chicken feather for comparison) was re-examined. Using a powerful electron scanning microscope, the parts of the cells which produced pigmentation, known as melanosomes, were isolated and determined to be black. Black melanosomes would serve to strengthen the feather’s structure, making it more durable, and so aid any attempted flight. The discovery had its consequences for me personally, because some ten years earlier I had painted this ‘portrait’ of Archaeopteryx (below), and with the information which I then had to work with, my choice of colours was wholly speculative.

But in my reconstructional art I passionately believe that, as in science, I have to follow wherever the available evidence takes me. With this new evidence now to hand, a rethink was clearly in order. I scanned in my original acrylic painting and digitally repainted the colours (below) to reflect these latest findings. And interestingly – and contrary to my own expectations – I find this second updated version more convincing.

At the moment, we do not know whether Archaeopteryx was an overall black, or whether this applied only to the flight feathers, of which the single feather is one. But now I find that I rather enjoy the idea of a black Archaeopteryx, with its raven-dark wings catching a flash of iridescence in the sunlight as, hesitantly and experimentally on some far Jurassic Kitty Hawk beach, it took advantage of a strong onshore breeze and raised itself for a few momentous seconds above the sands.

New evidence on the colour and nature of the isolated Archaeopteryx feather

Published as Article #637 in Nature Communications, 24 January 2012

Notes:

In his chapter on theropods in The Complete Dinosaur, edited by James O. Farlow and M. K. Brett-Surman, Philip J. Currie mentions that dinosaurs and birds share more than one hundred and twenty common characters in their anatomical features, and he concludes that '..the only character to define birds (from dinosaurs) is their ability to fly.' I would also add that all theropod dinosaurs and birds share the distinctive character of pneumatic (hollow) bones, and that it's worth remembering that feathers are simply modified reptile scales.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Were I allowed by some chance of time and nature - and my tolerant wife - to keep a pet dinosaur, then this particular dinosaur would be high in the running for my choice. I have, however, no name to offer it, because science has not given it one. The reason for this is that it is known only by its tracks: not a single fossilized bone has been discovered which can be associated with these tracks.

Such fossils are known as trace fossils, because they are the indirect traces which an organism has left behind, rather than being actual fossilized remains. But trace fossils can still tell us much. If they are animal tracks, how was it walking - on two legs or on four? How fast was it travelling? Was it alone, or in a group? And of course tracks will also tell us with reasonable certainty whether it was herbivorous or carnivorous, and, depending upon the strata in which the tracks were found, how long ago it lived.

Tracks which cannot be associated with a specific animal are given their own name, and that is the case with our little dinosaur here. The dinosaur's name remains unknown. The tracks have been named by science as Atreipus, after their 19th century discoverer, Atreus Wanner. These little footprints (my drawing below, about life-size) have been known from eastern America's Connecticut Valley for some time, and we can deduce that they were made by a small herbivore walking on all fours: the prints of both fore- and hind feet are clearly visible. In fact, the tracks are so small that this dinosaur's body size could not have been much larger than that of a domestic cat's. It's style of locomotion is described as being 'habitually quadrupedal', which is just a way of saying that walking on all fours was the usual thing for it to do.

Reconstructing an animal from its tracks alone is a major challenge in itself, but these delicate, almost dainty tracks drew me to them, and I wanted to know how this little dinosaur might have appeared in life. The skin patterns and colours of my painted reconstruction above are conjectural, but the feet and limbs - long hind legs and shorter front legs - and the walking stance, are highly probable, and are what the Atreipus tracks themselves indicate. At some time in the very early Jurassic, around 205 million years ago, this unknown little dinosaur wandered over what is now the Connecticut Valley, living out its life, and in its wake leaving these modest tracks as our only record of its passing.

Hawkwood

Source:

Paul E. Olsen and Donald Baird: The ichnogenus Atreipus and its significance for Triassic biostratigraphy: in K. Padian (ed.), The Beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs, Faunal Change Across the Triassic-Jurassic Boundary, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986, p. 61-87.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

A couple of evenings ago I overheard the remark in a video phone-in interview that a Fundamentalist Christian creationist with something of a reputation on YouTube was considering becoming a scientist, apparently so that he could disprove evolutionary theory, as it were, from the inside. I won't embarrass him by naming him here, but such an aspiration demonstrates only a lack of any grasp of the way in which scientific method actually functions. To explain:

In science, there is no plan; you simply go wherever the evidence takes you. True enough, parameters can be set up, and based upon sound reasoning and experience, an extrapolated subatomic particle is discovered, or an expected fossil actually turns up in a specific locality. But science does not deal in negatives. So setting out actually to scientifically 'disprove' something is a non sequitur.

Still, let's for the sake of this point assume that it's possible (and allowable within the scientific community). You 'disprove' a theory - and a well-established and long-accepted one at that. What are you left with? A mere vacuum. You have done nothing actually to replace the quashed theory with anything new, with a viable alternative of your own that steps in to replace what you have trounced. To do that, you'd have to marshall your evidence and send a hypothesis of your own down the long and well-worn road that any scientific hypothesis has to tread in order to gain acceptance. In short: you'd actually have to practice science. Real science. And in science, things are neither *'proven' nor 'disproven', just accepted.

It's possible, of course, that some line of scientific reasoning might disprove something else, but it does so simply as a by-product of 'doing what it does', not as an intent. Like the way in which the mechanisms of evolution incidentally disprove creationism... :)

Hawkwood

*While proof in the understood sense of the term is not part of the definition of what constitutes a scientific theory, it is true enough that some theories have shown themselves to be so robust that they are to all intents and purposes accepted as fact - evolutionary theory being one of them. And a 'theory' in science has a different meaning to the word in everyday use, which is why the creationist claim that 'evolution is just a theory' is yet another non sequitur.And this clears up another widely-held misunderstanding by creationists: disproving something in science does not automatically 'prove' something else. So 'disproving' evolutionary theory would not by default establish that supernatural creation had occurred instead.The situation on the ground is that a supernatural means of creation would then have to be accepted and established as a scientific theory in it own right. Good luck with that one, creationists...